Impressions and a couple ??s from a new droid user

[MasterTec]

Hey guys! I'm new here and I'm sure there will be many others hopping in after Woot's sale!

While I know PC's like the back of my hand Droids are a completely different story. I've been considering a Droid device but being extremely CHEAP I couldn't justify spending several hundreds of dollars on one. When I saw the PE on Woot for $125 I couldn't pass it up (even with the company having gone under).

Obviously for the price I wasn't expecting it to compete with $500+ tablets that are out there but I'm quite surprised with how capable it is!

I do have to admit though.. the first thing I noticed is how 'cheap' the casing feels. It seems solid enough and looks just fine but it has a kind of 'thin' feel to it. It's hard to knock a product for that these days (ESPECIALLY at this price) because for the most part they all feel like that. I can see how a person who was used to the aluminum housing on more expensive products could quickly dismiss this as being a cheap hunk of junk - regardless as to how much less expensive it is!

As far as functionality goes.. it seems to just work. It's suffered heavy use for four days now and aside from freezing up for about two minutes once after a webpage displayed a pop-up it's worked just fine. Yes the eInk side does get just a little bit warm (not hot by any means maybe BARELY luke warm) it's nothing unusual and to be expected with a computer device like this.

As far as ease of use... well I suppose if the enTourage store still worked it would be a lot easier. If it supported droid market it would be easier still but we're left to look around for apps that we may need. No it's not that difficult and luckily I'm experienced enough to figure this out. I just worry that many people will give up and 'throw in the towel'. Don't be surprised to see a whole bunch of these show up on Ebay dirt cheap!

Battery life.. well it's kind of 'blah'. I may have made a discovery that may improve its life drastically. More about that below.

I'm especially surprised by its performance with videos. I was watching youtube videos and they were nearly as smooth as on my PC.

OK now some quick questions. These may be more of "Droid" questions than eDGe questions but here goes:

1> How do you QUIT applications? The only way I know how is to go in and manually force them to close. For example... lets say I'm playing ANGRY BIRDS. There is no option to quit. All you can do is click the HOME button and select another app. Does this mean that it is still running in the background using resources, or does it go into a 'holding' kind of mode where it goes in a hibernation kind of state and uses no resources until I go back to it?

2> Does the PE have bluetooth? The option to enable it is grayed out. The first thing I did was upgrade it to 2.2 and I don't know if it worked before or not.

3> Does it support 3G? That option is not grayed out and I actually have the option to add a mobile broadband network. Or is this option for installing an external 3G modem?

4> Can I get some help with the battery usage statistics? After having it powered off and charged up and turning it on a short while ago it says this:

39m 57s since unplugged

(signal strength bar image) eDGe idle 85%
Battery used by cell radio
Use details
Time on 39m 54s
Time without a signal 100%
Adjust power use
Switch to airplane mode to save power in areas with no cell coverage

(half sun image) Display 13%
Battery used by the display and backlight
Use details
Time on 32m 18s
Adjust power use
Reduce the screen brightness and/or screen timeout

(power button image) eDGe idle 3%
Battery used when phone is idle
Use details
Time on 7m 38s

So does this mean that 85% of my battery is being used trying to detect a 3g signal? Or does this include the wifi too?

What I did was I enabled AIRPLANE MODE which then shut off my WiFi but then I was able to manually reactivate WiFi and it remains in AIRPLANE MODE as well. The battery seems to last drastically longer since doing this but I'll have to play with it for some more time to be sure. Any theories or information as to why this might be?

[muranternet]

Closing programs: Force Close works, and is usually the last line of defense against a puking application. I know Angry Birds exits by going back to the primary screen and pressing the Back button (hardware); most apps work the same way. I haven't tried one yet, but there are a number of autoclose programs for Android that monitor unused programs and kill them periodically, mostly to preserve memory.

I also run in airplane mode. I don't know if it helps; at best, it may be freeing up CPU cycles where Ermine tries to poll a nonexistent 3G antenna.

I haven't tried Bluetooth yet in Ermine.

There's no 3G, so the 3G options won't do anything. It's just a standard component of Android, which is at its heart a cell phone OS.

I personally believe the battery usage meter is not displaying correctly. It always shows cell phone standby as a primary draw, but on almost every Android device the primary draw is actually the backlight.

The battery life is pretty bad. The most important thing you can do to increase it is to turn down the default brightness on your screen, and turn off your WiFi antenna when you're not using it. (Bluetooth is also incredibly piggy with power.) If you load up the Power widget on a homescreen, you can turn these things on and off with a touch. I also added the WiFi supplicant interval line to build.prop to reduce the amount of polling my antenna does, but that's less important. I also turned off all the animations, more to avoid any sort of component failure than to save power, but it does save a little.

[ivanjt]

Originally Posted by MasterTec

OK now some quick questions. These may be more of "Droid" questions than eDGe questions but here goes:

1> How do you QUIT applications? The only way I know how is to go in and manually force them to close. For example... lets say I'm playing ANGRY BIRDS. There is no option to quit. All you can do is click the HOME button and select another app. Does this mean that it is still running in the background using resources, or does it go into a 'holding' kind of mode where it goes in a hibernation kind of state and uses no resources until I go back to it?

2> Does the PE have bluetooth? The option to enable it is grayed out. The first thing I did was upgrade it to 2.2 and I don't know if it worked before or not.

3> Does it support 3G? That option is not grayed out and I actually have the option to add a mobile broadband network. Or is this option for installing an external 3G modem?

4> Can I get some help with the battery usage statistics? After having it powered off and charged up and turning it on a short while ago it says this:

1) If the app is well written then it quits when you exit it from its menu or use the back button. Only in very rare cases would you need to force close.
2) Yes, there are reports of people using bluetooth keyboards, headsets etc.
3) There is no internal G3 support. Using a G3 USB dongle worked, depending on the dongle, with 1.6, some of the people here are investigating if it can be reintroduced.
4) If the PE is anything like the EE then the built in battery monitor is rather hit and miss with the emphasis being on the miss. It also seems to require a few charge/discharge cycles to build up a more accurate picture.

[Filark]

You might want to find a copy of Elixir, an app that monitors all sorts of stuff on your PE (and plenty of stuff your PE doesn't have! ).

I don't remember offhand where I got it -- was originally suggested by Franky -- but you can search the forum for "Elixir" and find a link, I'm sure.

The lack of a "close" button has been one of the hardest things for me to get used to with Android! It just seems strange . . .

Welcome to MobileRead, MasterTec!